Not only do men make up the majority of employees on company calls, but they talk more often and longer than their female colleagues, according to Bloomberg.
Prattle, a communications analytics and research firm, studied over 155,000 company conference calls over the last 19 years and found men spoke 92 percent of the time. When women do speak on bank earnings calls, many times they deliver boilerplate introductions, even though they make up nearly 25 percent of investor relations employees.
"Male executives provide significantly more verbose answers to analyst questions than their female counterparts," Prattle CEO Evan Schnidman told Bloomberg. "One could surmise that male executives are more prone to speaking simply to hear themselves speak."
Sharon Zackfia, an analyst at William Blair, says little about the gender dynamics during conference calls over the course of her 18 year career.
"I follow some auto companies, where I’m the only female voice on the call," said Ms. Zackfia. "Maybe it takes me 30 seconds to ask my question and I get a five-minute answer from a male CEO."